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Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64 - excerpts

This page lists all recordings of Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64 - excerpts, by Sergei Sergeievitch Prokofiev (1891-1953) on CD, DVD, Blu-ray & download (MP3 & FLAC). Generally, more recent releases are listed first, but with priority given to those that are in stock.

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Orchestral showpieces such as those grouped here were among the most obvious beneficiaries of the advances in recording technique pioneered by Decca from the late 1950s onwards. Works which may have seemed dauntingly complex to an earlier generation of gramophone collectors could now be captured with startling clarity, due in no small part to the improved acoustic spread, and it was at this time that the great twentieth-century classics began to win a larger audience.

When the young Claudio Abbado came to make these recordings in London in the 1960s (he was 32 at the time of his very first Decca session on 11 February 1966 at which the recordings of Prokofiev’s Chout and Romeo and Juliet were begun), he had already begun to demonstrate his commitment to contemporary Italian music, and so it is perhaps not too surprising that he should have been contracted to record these classic works from the twentieth-century orchestral repertoire. This release is also interesting as an early document of Abbado’s relationship with the LSO in 1966, eventually becoming its principal conductor in 1979.

The founding of the Berliner Philharmoniker on the first of May in 1882 is annually celebrated with a concert in a European city of cultural significance. In 1996 the Europakonzert took place in the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg.

The Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg ranks among those opera houses that may well deserve to be called 'legendary'. It was here in this very theatre that many of the Great Russian operas received their premieres and where the Berliner Philharmonisches Orchester performed exactly 100 years ago for the first time, on the occasion of Tsar Nicholas II's. Coronation.

The Berliner Philharmoniker under the baton of Claudio Abbado celebrated 'their' anniversary with Russian favourites, which are complemented by two of Beethoven’s Violin Romances and his Seventh Symphony.

Kolja Blacher – the solo violinist – was the first concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker between 1993 and 1999.

Renowned bass baritone Anatoly Kocherga, whose international career began under Claudio Abbado at the Wiener Staatsoper in 1989, is the vocal soloist on this recording.

‘Living people can dance, the dying cannot’, Prokofiev wrote to explain the problems he faced when writing music for the ballet Romeo and Juliet. His original score was rejected as ‘undanceable’ by the Bolshoy Theatre and his initial scheme for a happy ending for the lovers was, fortunately, vetoed. The revised score, however, proved a masterpiece of expressive beauty and drama, with melting love music and huge bravura, and it remains one of the most loved ballet scores of the twentieth century.